Chapter 3: The LexCorp Conundrum
The Archive was not a room. It was a space, a geometric anomaly that hummed with a pure, electric energy. It smelled of old paper and ozone, and within its confines, data was not just stored—it was lived, a constant, low-frequency thrum of information. The walls were a shimmering, opalescent material that shifted and flowed, and in the center of the space floated a single, perfect sphere of white light, an all-seeing eye of knowledge.
Elliot, feeling the familiar hum of the System's presence, stood at the entrance as Lena Luthor, a vision of sharp intellect and elegant power in a dark business suit, strode inside. Her heels clicked on the polished floor, a sound of determined purpose.
"So this is it," Lena said, her voice a low purr of fascination and suspicion, the tone of a woman who had seen too many secrets and trusted too few people. "The repository of universal knowledge. Frankly, it's a little less intimidating than I expected. No giant, all-seeing eye?"
Elliot allowed a small smile. "That's for a different model. Lena, I've told you the premise. You are the proxy. You will access the knowledge related to the Blight and find the key to its weakness."
"And I don't get to keep the information?" Lena's eyes, green and sharp, bore into his, a direct challenge.
"The System will wipe your memory of the specifics upon your exit," Elliot said, his voice flat, a neutral statement of fact. "It's a necessary security protocol. To keep the knowledge safe from those who would use it for less than noble means. You of all people can understand that."
"And you expect me to believe that? To trust you blindly with my own mind?"
"No," Elliot said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. "I expect you to be tempted by the chance to touch something limitless. The Blight is a multiversal threat, a problem even your brother couldn't solve. But within this Archive, the solution exists. Don't you want to be the one to find it? Don't you want to prove to yourself that you are not him? That you are a hero, not a villain?"
Lena's posture shifted. Her lips, once curled in a skeptical line, parted slightly, a flicker of raw desire in her eyes. Elliot had hit the nail on the head. He knew her ambitions, her insatiable curiosity, her deep-seated desire to be a hero, to be the one who saves the world, not the one who nearly destroys it. He was offering her a chance to prove her worth to herself, a far more powerful motivator than a simple request.
[SYSTEM: PROXY DESIGNATED—KNOWLEDGE ACCESS GRANTED.]
A holographic interface, a beautiful cascade of crystalline data, appeared before Lena. She reached out, her fingers trembling with an emotion that was a strange mix of fear and excitement. She was a woman who had spent her life trying to escape the shadow of her brother, a man who had sought to control the world through knowledge. Now, she was willingly stepping into a sea of information that could either save a world or consume her.
"Oh, my god. Oh, my god."
Lena felt a tingling sensation spread from her fingertips to every nerve in her body. The knowledge of the Archive was not a flood; it was a deluge, a cosmic river that rushed through her mind. It bypassed her eyes and ears and went straight into her mind, a torrent of 4D data. She saw the Blight not as a green wave, but as a living, parasitic code. She saw its origins, a botched cosmic experiment from a long-dead civilization. She saw its vulnerabilities, the one-in-a-billion chance that a specific species could act as a catalyst for its destruction.
Her mind, a brilliant machine, processed the information with breathtaking speed. She felt the strain, a dull ache behind her eyes, but she couldn't stop. She saw a thousand worlds die, a thousand civilizations fall. She saw the faces of the lost, their hope turning to despair. And then, she saw the hope. The possibility. A single, pure-white crystalline structure, the very core of the Blight's weakness.
"My mind is a maelstrom of thoughts and data. This is bigger than my brother. This is bigger than LexCorp. This is everything. The Blight is a parasite. It has a core. A vulnerability. It's a bio-engineered weapon that needs a specific frequency to be disabled... and that frequency is found in a specific species. An amphibian from a water-based world... one that's still alive… a species with a unique, bioluminescent skin… a "cleanse protocol." I can do this. I can save them all. I will be the one who saves them."
The knowledge was too much, too overwhelming. She felt a profound and terrible joy, the kind of ecstasy that comes from seeing the solution to the universe's greatest riddle, the kind of high that only a true genius can feel.
Elliot watched from a distance, the silent murmur of Luminaris a constant whisper in his ear. He saw Lena, a silhouette against the shimmering data, her head bowed in concentration. He clasped his hands tightly behind his back, a nervous habit he had developed since his transmigration.
"Am I doing the right thing? Using her like this... is it wrong? He had promised her nothing but the truth, and he had delivered a half-truth. He was using her like a tool, a brilliant mind to access the data he couldn't. The System had told him it was for the greater good, a necessary security measure. But what if it wasn't? What if it was just a way for him to avoid a difficult choice?"
[SYSTEM: ETHICAL QUERY—DATA ERASURE IS A NECESSARY SECURITY MEASURE. PROXY'S WELL-BEING IS MAINTAINED. PROTOCOL IS WITHIN ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS.]
Elliot sighed. The System's logic was flawless. But logic and morality were two different things, two separate languages. He looked at Lena, a woman who had spent her life fighting for her own agency, her own identity, only to be used as a key. He felt a moment of profound hesitation, a brief, gut-wrenching pause before he gave the mental command. The memory wipe was complete.
Lena walked out of the Archive, her mind feeling strangely clear, as if she had just woken from a long, complicated dream. She looked at Elliot, a polite smile on her lips. "I don't remember what I was doing in there," she said, her voice a little confused. "But I feel... a new sense of urgency. A purpose. Like I'm about to solve the biggest puzzle of my life. It's on the tip of my tongue."
"I'm glad," Elliot said, his voice quiet. He felt the phantom weight of her forgotten knowledge, the burden he had placed on her without her permission. "Luminaris is always open to you, should you require it."
Lena gave a small, genuine smile. "I'll be in touch." She stepped through the portal, and the air suddenly felt normal, less charged with the hum of a cosmic engine.
Back in her office at LexCorp, Lena sat in a daze. The feeling was still there, a nagging itch behind her eyes, a whisper of a forgotten truth. She looked at a blank document on her computer, her hands itching to type, to write, to create. She felt like she had just been given the blueprint for something monumental, but she couldn't remember the details.
"What was I working on?" she whispered to herself. She had no answer. But she felt the fire of a new mission, a new purpose. She would not stop until she found what she had lost. And she would start with the city of Luminaris and the man named Elliot.
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